Can’t wait for OS X Mountain Lion to be released this summer? You can get many of the features of the next generation Mac OS X version right now. Whether you are running OS X Lion or to an extent, OS X Snow Leopard, read on to find out how to get everything from notifications, note syncing, synced reminders, iMessages, the simplified Safari UI, Twitter integration, AirPlay mirroring, and much more.

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Do you need to force quit an unresponsive Mac app? Is your Mac seeing the infamously dreaded spinning beachball of death? Is an app failing to respond to any input? Maybe you have an errant process or two? When any of the above happens, you’ll probably want to forcibly quit the application in question, and that’s what we’ll cover with this walkthrough, showing you how to force quit apps on a Mac with seven different methods.

Whatever your skill level with Mac, you’ll find a way to forcibly exit out of an app. Read on to learn more!

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A MAC address is a unique identification number assigned to network interfaces, these can be attached to physical hardware like NIC and Wi-Fi cards or assigned to virtual machines. On some occasions, you’ll need to change a MAC address to another ID.

We’ve received a few questions about this recently because the process of changing (sometimes called spoofing) these addresses has changed slightly from version to version in Mac OS X. With that in mind, we will show you how to change a MAC address in the latest versions of OS X 10.7, 10.8 Mountain Lion, and 10.9 OS X Mavericks, and OS X 10.10 Yosemite.

Launch the Terminal found within /Applications/Utilities/ to get started.
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CAPS LOCK is a either loved or hated, but regardless of the variety of opinions on capitalizing every single letter typed out, it can sometimes be just outright necessary. If you find yourself needing to use caps lock on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, it’s really easy to turn on and turn off, and you can do it from just about anywhere.

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Reflection is a great new app for OS X that mirrors an iPhone or iPad display directly to a Mac by way of AirPlay.
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By far the easiest way to sync an iPhone to a new Mac or Windows PC is to transfer all iPhone files and backups from the old computer to the new one. The necessary data is stored in several different locations, and we’ll cover what files and where they go for both Mac OS X and Windows.
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Deleting a group of emails in iOS Mail is fairly straight forward, it entails manually selecting each specific email you want to delete, and then relocating them to the Trash.

This process of deleting multiple emails is the same on Mail app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. We’ll cover the exact steps to take.

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Microsoft released Windows 8 Consumer Preview today, a pre-release version of their next generation operating system. Windows 8 incorporates the touch-centric Metro interface while still maintaining access to the standard Windows file system and desktop, effectively merging their tablet UI and desktop UI into a single operating system. This is obviously a different approach than Apple took while keeping separate iOS and OS X, but nonetheless Microsoft is bent on this strategy to compete with Apple’s offerings and the wildly successful iPad.

To be fair, Windows 8 is actually a pretty decent OS with some innovative ideas, and with the freely available Consumer Preview anyone can download an ISO and install it themselves to give it a whirl. If you’re curious what’s been cooking in Redmond Washington, running Windows 8 yourself is the best way to find out. Dust off that PC and run it natively, or you can try installing it on a Mac with Boot Camp or run it within VirtualBox or VMWare. Here are the general system requirements before getting started:

Windows 8 System Requirements

• 1 GHz CPU or faster
• 1GB of RAM or higher
• 16GB hard disk space
• DirectX 9 GPU or better
• Internet access
• Touch-screen to support multitouch features

If you have hardware that meets the requirements (you probably do), download an ISO and start installing, the links below point directly to Microsoft servers.

Download Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO

The product key for both versions is: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J

• Windows 8 CP 64-bit – 3.3GB – Download Now
• Windows 8 CP 32-bit – 2.5GB – Download Now

Don’t want to bother with downloading and installing a beta OS that you may not spend much time on? Check out the two videos below to see Windows 8 in action instead.

Read Receipts show the sender of a message that a message has been delivered these are enabled by default in iMessages for iOS, but they are disabled by default in Message for Mac. If you’re interested in having the read receipts sent along with each message received on your Mac, you can toggle a setting to do so.
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A long hidden airport command line utility buried deep in Mac OS X can be used to scan for and find available wireless networks. This powerful tool is very helpful for network admins and systems administrators, but it’s handy for the average user to help discover nearby wi-fi routers as well.

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It’s official: Apple will be unveiling the next iPad on March 7 in San Francisco at 10:00 AM PST. The confirmation of the previously rumored date came in the form of press invites sent out this morning, with an image showing what looks to be a high definition iPad screen and the words “We have something you really have to see. And touch.”

Since the invitation was sent out, Bloomberg has chimed in to confirm that iPad 3 will feature the much expected high-resolution display which is “capable of greater resolution than the current iPad, with more pixels on its screen than some high- definition televisions… the pixels are small enough to make the images look like printed material,” a quad core CPU and greater graphics processing capabilities, and be compatible with significantly faster 4G LTE wireless networks, noting that iPad will receive LTE support prior to the iPhone because of it’s larger battery capacity. The latter hinting that iPhone 5 will feature 4G LTE too.

Additionally, MacRumors posted some photos of a digital caliper measuring the thickness of what claims to be the rear shell of an iPad 3. The shell itself looks identical to the iPad 2 rear aluminium enclosure, but it measures in at 9.5mm, or about 0.8mm thicker than the current iPad 2. For some comparison to a tangible object, the iPhone 4 is also 9.5mm thick.

There is no information on iPad 3 availability after the initial launch, but typically Apple releases new iOS products within a week or two after announcement. Considering the immense interest in a retina screened quad core iPad, we can only hope that pre-orders will offered through Apple’s Online Store, otherwise expect long lines, daily sell outs, and weeks to months before the supply catches up to demand.

If you’re suffering from email overload, sometimes the easiest thing to do is just mark everything as read and start over again. While there is no select all or mark all as read option in iOS, you can mark multiple emails as read on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch as long as you select them manually with a tap. Here’s what you’ll need to do:

• Open Mail app and tap on “Edit” in the upper right corner
• Tap each email you want to mark as read so that a red checkbox appears on the left alongside the message
• Tap on the “Mark” button in the lower right corner
• Tap “Mark as Read”

The “Mark” buttons label will change to include the number of emails selected so you can be sure of how many messages will be marked as read.

As shown in the screenshots, you can also use bulk message selection within Mail search, making it easy to find and mark messages from a single sender or of a theme as read.

A MAC address is a unique identifier that is assigned to each physical network interface on a computer. Different than a computers IP address, MAC addresses are frequently used for network access control and to monitor network connectivity, and they can be spoofed for virtualization needs or to circumvent some network limitations. If you need to access yours, here’s how to find one from the friendly GUI and the command line.

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We recently covered 12 keyboard shortcuts to help navigate around and manipulate text in Mac OS X, and now we’ll show you a handful of similar tricks for use at the command line. These shortcuts can be used just about anywhere in the Terminal, including the bash prompt.
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Have you ever noticed that Mail app registers a message as “read” after it has been clicked? The automatic “mark as read” feature makes it easy to quickly skim through a bunch of emails, but Mail doesn’t offer much control over the the delay for when messages are marked read.

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Adobe has released the first real version of Photoshop for the iPad, called Photoshop Touch. The app is impressively featured and includes much of what you’d expect from Photoshop, including full layer support, all the standard color adjustments tools, a wide variety of filters, and many of the standard selection tools and brushes that make Photoshop so fun and powerful to use.

Photoshop Touch also has some interesting features that rely on internet access, including a built in Google image search feature that makes it easy to find images to edit, and of course there’s social sharing functionality so you can show everyone else your creations. To accelerate any potential learning curve with the new interface and touch controls, Adobe included several tutorials and sample galleries with Photoshop Touch too.

• Adobe Photoshop Touch is $9.99 on the App Store

Photoshop Touch requires at least an iPad 2 or newer and iOS 5 or later to use. Check out more screenshots and a video of Photoshop Touch in action, embedded below.

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Apple started airing a new iPhone 4S commercial on Sunday night that emphasizes iCloud. The ad shows iCloud automatically syncing calendars, photos, apps, contacts, music, and books, between an iPhone 4S and a variety of other Apple devices, including an iPad, iMac, and MacBook Air. The commercial ends with the text “Automatic. Everywhere. iCloud.” and the iPhone 4S monicker.

It’d be easy to mistake the TV ad for an Apple product other than the iPhone 4S, and that very well may be the point in that it demonstrates how well Apple products work with each other, particularly with iCloud.

If you haven’t set up iCloud yet, you should, the free service is genuinely useful and mostly seamless.

Although everyone should always password protect a Mac to prevent unauthorized use, not everyone does. Sometimes people share general logins, be it with a roommate, sibling, spouse or whoever else. Now, if you have ever wondered if someone was using your computer while you were away, there’s actually a pretty easy method to find out in Mac OS X.
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